


Lord Send Me a Mechanic

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Complicated Relationships, Eurydice works through some Feelings (tm), Gen, Inaccurate Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Post-Canon, area woman argues with god, both interpersonal and with the concept of religion in general, it's Mountain Goats o' clock motherfuckers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-10-10 05:57:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20523080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: A girl kneels on a train platform, head between her elbows, elbows tucked to knees, like a comma, like it’s not over, just stopped for a spell, like this whole thing is gonna keep going, and she don’t move. And then behind her, a man walks up and folds his dark glasses back into his breast pocket, one-two, click-click.Eurydice in the Afterlife.





	Lord Send Me a Mechanic

**Author's Note:**

> Huge shoutout to @ehmazing, without whom this fic would not be what it is <3

_ We inhaled the frozen air _

_ Lord, send me a mechanic if I am not beyond repair _

_ Psalms 40:2, The Mountain Goats _

* * *

**I. The Life of the World to Come**

This is what the shape of despair is:

A girl kneels on a train platform, head between her elbows, elbows tucked to knees, like a comma, like it’s not over, just stopped for a spell, like this whole thing is gonna keep going, and she don’t move. And then behind her, a man walks up and folds his dark glasses back into his breast pocket, one-two, _ click-click. _

He says, “Get up, girl,” not ungently. 

But not quite kindly, either.

And what despair is, is that she ain’t crying. She makes a sound sometimes like she _ might _ be crying, but Eurydice, poor kid, she don’t rightly remember the last time she really let it go and bawled. Just one of those things, like how some folks can’t whistle. So it sounds all choked-up and busted-open, but her face is dry. She can see the man perfectly out of the corner of her eye, like how you can always see a mountain, and all she says is:

“Why.”

Mr. Hades, he looks out along the track. Inspects the jaws of its tunnel, and he moves so slow he might not even be moving at all. Different scale, geologic time, and ain’t Himself accustomed to wait. He looks out along the track, and over along the Wall, and never, not once, down at the miserable girl-comma huddled before him.

Finally, distantly, he says:

“If you’re waiting on that boy to come down, you’re gonna want to find a way to keep busy. Chewin’ on it don’t bring ‘em back.”

Like he oughta know.

“Why _ me, _” she hisses brokenly, a sound like smoke coming off a car crash.

“Because,” and he’s still just _ there_. Hasn’t moved. Hasn’t made even the vaguest motion to comfort her, hasn’t altered his voice one bit from the even, gravely drawl he started with, and he says, “Because my wife had a fondness for your boy and his singin’, and I had a mind to punish the both of them for it.”

That’s the thing about the Underground, is it’s too dark. Nowhere to hide from the awful, plain truth, and he doesn’t even sound sorry. Why should a God be sorry. 

And for a second, for just a second, the awful bluntness of it makes her so blindingly, incandescently furious that for a _ second_, her fists clench up, nails biting into her palms. Her whole _ self _ clenches up. She can feel herself about to unwind and give him one good slug, right in the jaw, before the rest of her remembers what a colossally stupid idea that is. 

But angry will get you up, even on an empty stomach, on an empty everything, angry will get a body up and at ‘em, and it does get her up, even if it’s just to sit slumped back into her heels. The only trouble with it is that angry, angry’s like coke. Burns hot, burns bright, and the smoke’ll kill anything and everything inside a mile if you don’t bank the damn oven sometime. A coke fire, a coal fire, can burn for years before you put it out. Goes down, comes right back up farther down the seam. Ilium burned for three days and three nights, and Laurel Run for the better part of forty years. Centralia’s still goin’, heard tell. Eurydice is burning up, down under her ribs.

And Mr. Hades, his eyes are so black and still and far away it makes it seem pointless to even try being angry in the first place. Like whatever you’d do would just break over him, and he’d still just be _ there_, looming like the end of everything.

Here is the shape of it:

An unfinished sentence of a girl, sore down to her bones. A man, upright and unmoving, unmoved.

Eurydice feels her eyes start to sting, but nothing comes out.

“Not what you wanted to hear, was it, girl?” Hades rumbles. “Never is. But you’re gonna want to eat something, at least, if you plan on sticking around long enough for him to find. Body wants meat. Blood and fat. Keep your skin stitched down.”

The worst part of it is, is that she weren’t even special. Not like Orpheus was special. Not _ touched_. A man hurts you, he could at least have the goddamn decency to make it personal, but no. She was just. 

Collateral. 

All the fight goes out of her in one long rush, collapsing into a snakey, hollow bitterness.

“You fixin’ me a plate, then, Mr Hades?” she snaps, like a rattler will snap, before she can manage to stop herself. But Hades just gives her a long, black look from a thousand miles away and says,

“Alright. You make it up to my house, child, and I will. My word.”

Takes a book out of his pocket. Marks it down. Pencils her in.

Still.

The shape of despair is a girl looking up, jaw moving like she wants to cry, eyes like a mine fire, but not crying, just looking, spine sunk back into her heels. It’s not _ fair_.

Eurydice whispers it up, barely breathing, “When does it stop feeling like the world’s ended?” 

“Never. Girl, this world has been ending since it started. All the damn thing ever does.”

His hands are moving, somewhere a thousand miles up. Rolling a cigarette, with the ease of long practice, which don’t rightly seem like the sort of thing that a God oughta be able to do. It’s too human. He doesn’t offer it so much as he holds it out a little way aways from himself in such a way that a body might take it from him, if inclined.

“What is it?” she rasps, looking sidelong.

“A smoke. Gonna be waiting a good while, girl. Best find a way to live with it.”

Eurydice does not take the cigarette.

Hades does not shrug so much as he twists his grizzled head down and along, barely moving, and raises the cigarette to his own mouth instead.

“Blood and fat,” he repeats, taking a long drag. 

Leaves.

The shape of despair is a girl, alone.

* * *

**II. Pluto to the Pleiades **

Hades is called the Receiver of Many, and to him go the prayers of the Dead. Whether they want ‘em to or not. 

_Lord Hades, send me not into overtime. Let the line roll on. Let my shift run as does the clear river. O God, when wilt thou see Rotary No. 2 repaired? Tell my family I’m sorry, Lord, but I had to go. Render unto me that holy Fifteen Minute Break which is my birthright. Let not my tobacco run empty. Give a brother a light, Lord Hades, least you can do. _

Eurydice is not much for prayer. Never was.

It’s hours before she can stand. Days. Months, maybe; she’s never had time before to just sit and hurt. There was always something needed to be done, and now, with all the time in the world, Eurydice finds that what she really wants is to just lay down. Wallow like a hog in her own misery.

It gets old.

The light never changes, and well... 

Eurydice, all that girl ever knew was how hit the bricks when things got bad, and things are about as bad as they get, but there ain’t nowhere to run to but the line.

Second shift, it ain’t so bad. You get the morning to yourself, such as there are mornings Down Below.

She introduces herself to everyone, and mostly they just look up tiredly, sometimes smile tiredly, sometimes nod. The newer ones shake hands, but nobody says much of anything until the day that Eurydice introduces herself to the man on the line next to her, already braced for the dismissal. Instead, he lets out a long, low whistle and says:

“Shit, girl, you look like somebody gone and pissed in your breakfast. What’s wrong?”

His name is Tiresias, blind as a goddamn bat and twice as chattery, like it’d kill him all over again if he ever shut up. They talk. Or he talks, and Eurydice hangs on it like it’d kill her over again to face the silence. Tiresias spent some time as an oracle, he says. Says he can see the future, and it’s all coming up roses, believe you me. Would I lie?

He talks himself in circles, most days. Goes off on tangents, some crock about the language of birds (it’s the accent that’s hardest, hand to God, but the grammar’s not too bad).

Eurydice frowns. 

“My...” she stops. Swallows. Eurydice says, “My husband, he told me a story about birds.”

Tiresias cocks his head.

“You don’t have to forget y’know. Your husband. Your life. Most folks do, I s’pose it seems easier to reckon with never going back if you don’t remember there’s anything to go back to, but you don’t have to.” He shrugs, like it don’t make no nevermind to him, he’s just sayin’. “I mean it. You don’t gotta. Hell, I used t’raise ghosts all the damn time, knock the sense back into ‘em, have a good old time. Just ask Her.”

“Who?” like Eurydice don’t already know.

Tiresias grins. 

“Ask the Lady.”

* * *

**III. The Machinist**

Sometimes there’s another fella on the line, big ol’ son-of-a-bitch with hands cut up like a fistful of glass and his cap pulled down low over his brow. He don’t talk much, outside a series of minutely differing grunts, which Eurydice can only just parse. Comes in with the coal-diggers, sometimes, and it seems like all he has to do is slide those big, busted-up fingers against the rock, any old which way, and the earth opens up to him like a girl looking for a good time. Easy.

More often, he prowls around with the mechanics and the machinists, wheedling and coaxing unintelligibly under his breath while prodding at the guts of machinery with a wrench the length of Eurydice’s thigh. The machines, they _ scream _ sometimes, they squeal under the strain, or whine like kicked dogs. 

Whoever he is, they like him, though. Roll over and wag their tails and do whatever it is a machine does when it loves you. They’ll damn near fix themselves for _ him_.

And just once, she saw him pull out from where he was, bent-over waist-deep inside a busted generator, and he took the cap off to mop at his forehead, and he had the whitest hair she’d ever seen.

Eurydice ain’t stupid. 

A girl can put two and two together, and if Hades has time for whatever he’s playing at out there on the line he’s got time for her. Wherever he penciled her in, he can rearrange his damn schedule.

She’s got something to say.

* * *

**IV. Houses of the Holy**

Here is what God’s house looks like: half like a rich man’s house, half like a thing hacked out of the rock, chisel-marks and all. One of God’s dogs growls at her as she goes in, like a freight train made of teeth. Another stares suspiciously from God’s sofa cushions. A third yawns, cutthroat tongue lolling, from behind God’s hip. God’s dogs have heavy shoulders and big, jowly, bone-cracking heads, splotched grey and black.

God regards her. Consults his book.

“Alright.” he rumbles.

It ain’t the _ strangest _ thing’s ever happened to her, but hell if it ain’t right up there.

God is frying her a steak, fat sizzling in the pan, and his sleeves are rolled up in a way that is somehow horrifying in its casualness. He periodically nudges a dog out of the way with his foot with a kind of gruff affection it feels somehow voyeuristic to witness. His silverware is so fine that just looking at it feels like stealing.

God has bone china plates. The steak is rare, and bloody.

Don’t even know if she’s hungry, Eurydice, don’t even know if she can be anymore, but something in her remembers, and anyhow, ain’t every day that God Himself fixes you a plate. So she sucks the fat from the bone until there’s nothing left, and then a little longer, just in case.

“I want to talk to him,” she says.

Hades has one hand on the table, one hand on a dog’s head. In the strange, low light of God’s kitchen, it is suddenly, impossibly easy to see the shape of the bones behind his face.

“You stop your beggin’, you’re not getting any,” he mutters, and Eurydice starts, but he’s talking to the dog. It snaps at his hand half-heartedly before loping off.

He turns his face to her, and Mr. Hades, he’s Titan-bred. Big man, Mr. Hades, with the ridge of his eye sockets pushing up against the skin like a hole punched all the way through the earth.

“Not my place to let you. My wife’s business,” he says, not ungently, but not quite kindly, either. He almost, but does not quite chuckle, and adds, “Like I said, girl. You’re gonna be waiting. Best find a way to live with it.”

He takes her plate. Stands. 

And Eurydice, who don’t think she can rightly stomach the thought of watching God wash dishes, Eurydice, with nothing left to lose, and months still to wait, what Eurydice does is she pushes back from the table, and she says, as she goes, “Would you have—“

But can’t quite get it out.

Mr. Hades, his eyes are black, like flint, like the heat-death of the Universe, and his voice scrapes like a knife on bone.

“Best get back, now, girl. The line don’t stop.”

* * *

**V. Occupational Safety**

Here is a prayer to Hades:

_ Oh, Lord, bring home your Lady. Oh, Lord, retire thou into thy office and let Her go among us, God, we miss her. _

It’s June. Three months left. Eurydice waits.

Eurydice works the second shift, and sometimes, she talks to a white-haired fella on the line with the machinists, and they go through the elaborate charade of pretending they don’t know who the other one is. He calls himself “Aidoneus” and her “new girl.” He lays on hands and socket wrenches, and the generators purr like kittens in his wake, but he keeps his cap pulled low. Nobody else seems to _ see _ him. He just looks at her, not kindly, but not cruel, and tells her to choke up on that shovel. Kick your feet out. Gonna hurt yourself standing like that.

The thing is, is she can’t quite suss out what it is between them. And even Tiresias, blind as he is, could see that Hades’ dogs and his wife and his work comprise the whole of Mr. Hades’ capacity for love. So it ain’t any kind of romance. Ain’t any kind of paternal. It’s just that she can’t tell if he cares, or if he just can’t stand to see a job done poorly. It’s just that sometimes, she sits in God’s kitchen, and God fries her a steak, and it happens often enough that God’s dogs will sit up at her feet and beg until God calls them off.

“Did you mean any of it? What you said to me?” she huffs, just because she can, just like she sits perched cross-legged with her boots up on God’s chair because she can. “Or were you just trying to make her jealous?”

“Girl, you sure do take liberties, don’t you.” God purses his lips, and he stares, and his eyes go on and on and on forever, like the inside of a scream, like seeing through a glass darkly, a flat black plane that reflects nothing, like you could drop out the other side of it, but so deep you never would. Eurydice stares back.

“Well, you let me.”

God almost, but doesn’t quite laugh. “You want my advice?”

“No, I don’t,” Eurydice snaps.

“Get good at begging. My wife appreciates that.”

That time, she asks him, as she leaves, shrugging into her coat, if he even loves his wife, if he would’ve looked—

And Hades stops her cold, voice gone so hard and so sharp you could carve through the whole of Creation with it, and he says:

“Back on the line, child.”

* * *

**VI. Ghost in the Machine**

Here is a prayer to Hades:

The miner, who prays, _ Lord Hades, you who are foreman among foremen, boss among bosses, can you keep that man off my back today, My God, I cannot take it. O God, who is God of all that glitters, of the gold vein and the earth’s black blood, let me find color. Lord of anthracite and amethyst, keep me flush, O God, if not by the seam I ask that you show me, then by my wage. Spare a dime, Lord Hades, for we who work your earth, amen. _

Two months. The sparrow-skull knobs of her shoulders swell into hard muscle, her arms bloom into unfamiliar shapes.

And Eurydice, she worries, maybe, that she really has burned through whatever grace she was afforded, and spends weeks trying to puzzle through what that means. Poor kid looks so stuck on it that Tiresias pulls a double so she can sit and chew on it, looking for a man in a cap who never shows.

Then one day, he does, coming in with the coal-diggers, cap low. Eurydice leans heavily on her pickaxe, mouth open before she’s even decided to say anything, drawling, “Look who’s back. Good to see you, old man.”

Thing is, she half means it.

He snorts, a harsh, sharp exhale through his nose, tossing his head like a fly-stung draft horse. All around them, the ghosts in Hades’ machines don’t even notice, except Tiresias on her other side, who makes such a show of minding his own business that he’s _ definitely _ eavesdropping.

Hades, or Aideonus, or whatever the hell he wants to call himself, rolls his eyes, busying himself with a length of cable. “Girl, nobody in an age on an age has ever thought it was _ good _ to see me. Get that axe up, now, before the boss hears tell you’re slacking.”

Eurydice laughs.

* * *

**VII. Working Man’s Blues**

Here is a prayer to Hades:

The grave-digger, who prays, _Soften your earth for the Spade, O Lord of keys and coffins. O God, you who receive many, whoever this was, receive them. Take them in. Take them down. Lord Hades, let not my own back be broken in the service of sending them to you. Lord, let the graveyard shift be not too late, O God of the buried and the bonepit, let there be coffee in my cup when it is, amen._ _Lighten my shovel. Lighten my load. _

One month left. 

Eurydice works the second shift, and takes her suppers in God’s kitchen, and once, with a dog’s heavy, bone-cracking head propped up on her knee, she finally did break down and cry, salting the steak God fried her with her own tears. He did not move to comfort her, not even once, only silently took her plate, while she sobbed, “Why didn’t he _ trust _ me?”

God did not, at that time, do anything but call his dog back from her lap, and let her stain the old, stony wood of his table with her crying.

Finally he murmured, “Flighty. They’re all that way, that boy’s kin. Nothing good comes of a man who never worked for a living.”

“Sure,” she sniffled ruefully, fists balled in her lap, “Sure, you’re just a working stiff like the rest of us, _ Lord _Hades. Foreman must ride _ you _ something awful.”

And she’d looked up at him. There was salt on her lips, and it tasted almost, but not quite like blood. 

God was quietly scratching his dog’s ears, and his eyes looked like the kind of wrung-out, raw-boned sleep a body drops into when they just don’t got one goddamn thing left in ‘em, and he said:

“Keeps a man busy.”

Soft. Closer to gentle than she’d ever heard from him. And it seemed so _ important _ that all of her loss was for _ something_, that all the hurt meant _ something_, and God, this time, poured a mug of coffee and said:

“The ones you love, they will leave you, girl. Time and again. I would not look, because I would know already that she wasn’t with me. And I would not have given her the satisfaction.”

Eurydice curled her hands around the mug, and it hurt, almost too hot to bear. The burn sunk into her palms, into the bones of her wrists, and it stayed there, a mine fire inside her bone-china cup. Heard tell that Centralia was still burning, even seventy years on.

“That’s just about the worst thing I ever heard,” she whispered, staring into the steam. God grunted, breathy and low and indecipherable, looking blackly into the middle distance.

“Stick around, child. Gets worse.”

* * *

**VIII. Cold Snap**

Here is a prayer to Hades:

The caved-in, who prays, _ O God, if it be my time, then take me softly, let me rest easy, Lord. I ain’t got a dime to my name, Hades, spot me the fare? You-who-are-Below, I can work it off. God, my back is strong, I can work it off if you spot me. Lord, don’t let it be my time, but if it is my time, then help me, Lord Hades, help me down easy. O Lord, I am afraid. Please. Please, God, they say you are not cruel, show me that you are not cruel, amen. _

Autumn comes down almost silently, train chugging like somebody told it not to wake the baby, braking with a hushed, sheepish squeal.

The smoke breaks in Hell stretch a little longer, taut with a jittery, giddy anticipation. The ghosts in the machine start to pray not to their Lord, but his Lady, Our Lady, Our Lady of the Dog Days and Bathtub Gin, and Oh, how they missed her. Oh, Lady, ain’t she a sight for sore eyes.

Now, how it shakes it out, is that the train hauls in Autumn like a truckload of heroin, snuck in on the overnight outta San Francisco, but Eurydice, she misses it. To be fair, most everybody does, but Eurydice, who takes her supper with God so regular that she’s starting to take it for granted, misses it because she’s already halfway to Hades, not even bothering to knock before she goes in, already stepping out wide to one side to dodge the dog which sleeps in front of God’s door, but the dog ain’t there.

He’s on his back in the middle of God’s rug, paws up, tail wagging furiously, and panting a dopey, doggy grin while God’s Wife scratches his belly and coos, “There’s my boy, did you miss me? Huh? Did you miss me, baby?”

And then several things happen at once.

One, the dog catches sight of Eurydice, and half rolls over, _ whuff _-ing a soft greeting, and then,

Two_, Persephone _ catches sight of Eurydice, and sits up _ very _tall, cold and queenly, her hair falling around her like leaves, and then,

Three, Hades comes in from the next room, and catches sight of the pair of them and then does not move.

“Now, I know you’re not stupid enough to try runnin’ around on me while I’m _ here_,” Persephone drawls cooly, looking back and forth between them. “Or I thought you were.”

“Never,” growls Hades, low and serious and oblique enough that you could take it for heartbreak, or just wounded pride.

“Oh, good. Knives’re all in the kitchen, and I’d hate to have to get up. It’d fuss the dog.”

She smiles, as warm and sunny as dying of heatstroke. Her eyes crease at the corners like she might laugh, but laugh like a hyena does, all toothy and territorial. 

At the same time, Eurydice does the only thing she can think of.

Which is to blurt out, mouth ahead of her brain by a goddamn country mile:

“I—He—it ain’t like that, ma’am, I—when I came back, after—and I asked, he said I oughta eat, and I asked if he was gonna be the one to feed me, and he said—he _ promised_, so I came up to the house one day, and he—and then I came back, and—”

She worries at a loose button on her coat, shifting like a sprinter at the block from foot to foot, ready to run.

But Persephone only settles the dog’s head in her lap, and raises an eyebrow at her husband.

“Since when do you feed strays?”

He deposits himself like limestone into the corner of his sofa, rolling a cigarette without looking with the ease of long practice. It still don’t seem quite right for a God to be able to do that, but he does, with a thoughtful twist along the seam of his mouth. 

Hades regards Eurydice.

“How long you been down here, child?”

“A-about six months?” she stammers.

Hades regards his wife.

He does not so much offer Persephone the cigarette as much as he holds it out into the space between them with a motion so fluid and automatic that it barely happens at all, already over by the time the thought of starting takes shape. She takes it without looking, the exact same way.

_ Oh_, thinks Eurydice.

“There you go,” he says, settling back. “Since about six months ago.”

Persephone fixes him with a withering stare.

“That ain’t funny,” she says, but she chuckles, an awkward little huff as she thumps the dog on his side. “Come on, baby. Looks like we got company.”

She rises, impossibly straight, impossibly lovely, cigarette fluttering like a white flag between her fingers.

Eurydice shifts. Legs like a goddamn jackrabbit, that girl. Bolt as soon as look atcha. The meanest little shape of a polite demurral bubbles up to her lips, but Persephone cuts it off with a dismissive flap of her hand before it’s even started.

“Don’t you even think of leavin’ now, girl, you came all this way. I’d hate to put you out.”

And it ain’t the _ most _ excruciating dinner she’s ever sat through, but hell if it ain’t up there.

Eurydice chews her steak, and God drinks his whiskey, and God’s wife smokes her cigarette, taking long, slate-blue drags while she scratches the dog’s ears under the table. All just as taut and polite as a Sunday hanging.

Except for when God and His Wife lapse, and he tells her to stop teaching the dogs to beg like that, voice gone all dry and hopelessly, helplessly fond, and she snipes back at him that he started it, introducing them to her in the first place, smiling like she can’t help it. And then it goes quiet again, nothing but the scrape of silverware.

It’s like this:

Eurydice knows hunger. The memory of it is still too keen for the idea of skipping out on a meal to sit right with her. 

On the other hand, it is a _ hell _ of a thing to just sit there, chewing her steak, and watch the two of them act so goddamn married. Eurydice has no notion what to make of it. She never learned the shape of whatever _ that _ is, never got the chance to have fights just for show, the good, Wedgewood-patterned fights you break out when company’s over, just to show how married you are. Don’t know if she would even be inclined to. She imagines Orpheus would not.

Only one way to find out, she reckons. Now’s as good a time as any to ask it. Ain’t like she’s ever gonna have the advantage of her own turf Down Below. She remembers God’s Wife as kind, mostly. She tucked a poppy the size of a man’s fist into Eurydice’s own hair, just that once, and that’s gotta mean something, don’t it? She gave them flowers. Pled their case.

Eurydice don’t know, poor kid, is that Persephone may be Our Lady of a hell of a lot, but “mercy” ain’t one of those things.

Eurydice presses her lips together, shiny with grease.

“Ma’am? I want to talk to Orpheus. He—Mr. Hades—he said you were the one to ask.”

Persephone presses her lips together. There is lipstick on her cigarette, blood-bright, the brightest thing in the whole room. She takes a long drag, leaning heavily on the table, and Persephone regards her husband with a _ look_.

“Did he.”

“Your business. Your idea. I argued against it, as I recall.” God’s Husband sips his whiskey, settling the edge of his glass against the craggy ridge of his eyebrow. One eye black as anything, black as nothing, the other turned gold. “You said it wasn’t fair that all the mopping up, you called it, got left to the living. Said you’d seen enough of both sides, and it wasn’t fair, you said, to the ones who get left behind.”

God snorts, rolling her eyes, and turns to Eurydice, hyena-laugh thrumming under her voice. 

“Remembers everything don’t he?” she drawls. “Won’t let one _ goddamn _ thing go.”

Our Lady of Judgement. Our Lady of Ways and Means and Deals in the Dark.

Eurydice leans in, can’t help but pitch herself forward, eyes wide and dark, but that girl never did know how to beg. Too eager.

“But you can?” 

“That was a long time ago.” Persephone sighs. She smokes. Shakes her head, tongue shifting restlessly over her teeth as she says:

“You get older, baby, and you realize it don’t do nobody a lick of good, chewing open old scars like that. It ain’t worth it. Let it go.”

It sounds kind.

But it ain’t.

* * *

**IX. Prohibition**

A prayer to Hades, from an unmarked dump site on the coast, cinder blocks strewn all around like missing teeth, easy to pry up, easy to chain to ankles; from the beach head with its wine-dark, pall bearer’s riptide: _ Lord of Bricks and Buzzards, when this sumbitch hits your shores, don’t listen to a word he says. _

Here is how a girl makes a plan in Hell: fifteen minutes at a time.

Eurydice works the line, and Eurydice takes that sacred communion of fifteen minutes to your goddamn self, back pressed to a banked furnace to ease the ache between her shoulders, as is the way in Hell. She cracks her neck like an engine backfiring, and ain’t that just a kick in the damn teeth, half a year dead already, and everything still hurts. Eurydice huddles into the heat, and takes that Holy, that Blessed fifteen to catch Tiresias around the other side of furnace and ask:

“So where is it?”

Tiresias tips his head back, grinning as bright and blind as the moon. 

“Where’s what?”

“The bar. Her bar, where is it?”

And Tiresias, being the kind of law-abiding, upstanding fella that he is, he wouldn’t know nothin’ about that, and he’ll tell her so. Snickers into his overalls like it’s just the funniest goddamn thing.

Eurydice works the line. She takes her suppers alone, in her narrow little room, or hunched around the back of a generator. Eurydice takes her fifteen to inquire what, hypothetically, a less upstanding fella than ol’ Tiresias would have to say about the whereabouts of God’s Infernal Speakeasy. Hypothetically.

It occurs to her that she might be lonely. 

But Hades stays well clear of Hell while Our Lady walks the factory floor; in her wake, the grid flickers and spits like a mean stray. Like it wants to roll over for her, but can’t seem to work out how to let it happen.

Factory Floor. Third shift. The graveyard shift, furnaces as low as they ever get, and all the lights in Hell sputtering like they’ve got something to say. Sodium yellow. Mercury blue.

God stands in her black dress, black like Her Husband’s eyes, black like coal. She doles out gin and opium from a busted-up suitcase that looks to contain the whole damn world inside its brown-leather trim. God lines ‘em up, God knocks ‘em down; shots of vodka, and whiskey, and April Showers, and Mornings in June.

And Eurydice, she’s maybe a little drunk on the Spirit, a little high on the fumes coming off that suitcase, kerosene and coffin varnish and grain alcohol so stiff you might as well hold a wake for it, because she jumps the line. She’s bigger dead than she ever was in life, but the body remembers. Eurydice makes herself small again, slipping through the queue with her head low. Eurydice used to lift pockets like that, nickel-and-dime-ing her way into a meal. Didn’t nobody hold onto their money tighter than a girl held onto her need.

Jumps the queue, Eurydice, and she stands before God with her chin pushed up like she won’t take no for an answer. The expression doesn’t sit quite right on her face.

“What can I do ya for?” God hums, and Eurydice, in the presence of God, chokes up. Freezes like a jackrabbit in the middle of the damn road. Just stands there. Her chin quivers. God pours Eurydice a shot of something that glitters, not like stars or like diamonds, but like tears. God pushes it towards her, and says, “Go on. On the house.”

It tastes like a kick in the teeth. Burns all the way down.

But it works, that kind of liquid courage; Eurydice wipes her mouth on the back of her hand and starts in.

“I want to talk to Orpheus.”

Persephone sighs, and turns away, passing around thick-bottomed mason jars of sunshine, which looks like corn whiskey, and moonshine, which looks like it could strip paint. Turns back. Persephone purses her lips and drawls, “He know any more songs than you do? ‘Cause I’m getting tired of this one, chickadee. Let it go. You ain’t gonna get anything out of it but hurt.”

“Please. I don’t_—_I understand how it is here, I’m not asking you to do it for nothing. I can pay, whatever it costs, I_—_”

“It ain’t like that, girl. But there are some things that you do just to see how bad it’s gonna feel, and that’s what this is. Just pokin’ a bruise. Don’t go gutting yourself open for the sake of some boy who couldn’t keep his eyes front for the length of a road trip.”

She pours another shot, something thick and syrupy with bitters, the colour of loss. Persephone pushes it down the bar, shaking her head. The grid throws an uneasy halo onto her hair.

“I mean it. Whatever drove him to…” she gestures vaguely, circling her wrist in the air before landing squarely back on, “to fuck it up. After all that, the boy was gonna take a turn on you sooner or later.”

Eurydice stares at the shot glass. She doesn’t drink it.

“Tiresias said_—_”

“That old goat wouldn’t know the truth if it bit him in the ass. He tell you I made an exception, just for him? Like I’m gonna make one just for you?” God shakes her head, mouth twisting grimly. “You don’t gotta forget, I’ll give you that. But you gotta move on.”

As good a dismissal as any Eurydice’s gotten. Move along, now. Nobody likes a fella holding up the line.

* * *

**X. Devil Talkes Care of His Own**

Here is the shape of it:

There is nowhere to run to in Hell, except for the line, because there is nowhere else in Hell except the Boss’s House, and the Boss’s office, which is about as much choice as asking a girl if she’d rather be shot or hanged. Eurydice runs, because it’s all she knows how to, with her need balled up in her fists and her hurt balled up safe under her ribs, and she ain’t even lookin’ where she’s running to. She thinks _ up_, like she could run right out of Hell if she could just get fast enough, tear clear through the ceiling and out the other side.

But she just slams her shoulder into the Boss’s office door, instead. 

Slams her fists into it, which are harder now than they ever were when she was alive. Barely even hurts, not the way she wants it to. No satisfaction in it. Eurydice slumps down the length of the door, not crying, not even making a noise like she wants to, just sniffling, just a little, red-eyed and hollow.

The office door opens.

And a man steps out.

He does not offer her his handkerchief, or his hand. He just says, not ungently, but not kind:

“Get up, girl. You got one left in you.”

“She said no. She said…”

“I know what she said. Do you want it, or don’t you?”

* * *

**XI. An Old Tale**

A prayer to Hades, from the murdered: _ Justice, O God. _

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

The worst thing in the world happens.

Then life goes on.

Don’t get any kind of closure on it, but then who does?

Eurydice imagines forgiving Orpheus. She imagines telling him that she never will. Truth be told, Eurydice has not entirely made up her mind on the matter. She only knows that she has to see him, knows it with same triplicate certainty that she used to know when to hit the road. Only that she was loved, and she was hurt, and that’s the same old story everywhere, but Eurydice, she is gonna make hers turn out this time. They’re gonna talk it out. They’re gonna make it right.

Eurydice steels herself. It’s easy to steel yourself in Hell, they got loads of the stuff. Crank it out day and night, good shit, too. Don’t bend for anything. Eurydice goes before God.

God says No.

God has three dogs, and they have red mouths, and splotchy, heavy, bone-cracking heads, and God’s dogs would do anything for her. God’s dogs love her best, on account of she’ll let them up on the bed, which God’s Husband will not do, even spoiling them like he does. God has never once had it in her to deny them any little thing their doggy hearts desired. God takes her dogs out every day from September to March, and anything as needs guarding will just have to go without.

God says No, with her fist tight around the leash, when Eurydice comes trotting up to let the Dogs sniff her knuckles.

God says No, when Eurydice makes her bid, this time for all the marbles, this one for keeps, and tells God that her husband works the line, did God know that? That kind of information, that’s worth something, ain’t it? Worth a call. Worth a try.

“Orpheus, he...he must’ve meant something to you, if you decided to help us. We have that in common, at least. You know what it’s like, leaving somebody. We...”

And God is Fed Up.

God bares her teeth, her dogs bare their teeth, and her blood-bright mouth is the only light in the entire universe.

“You think _ we? _” God snarls, “You think you got something in common with me? Because you left _ once?_ You came down here yourself. Me, girl, I have been leaving my husband since time began. Bouncing back and forth like a fucking roulette ball, and you think you got something in common in with me? Ain’t a game you can win, but I make the best of it. If I can swallow that pill, child, so can you.” 

Anyway, what the hell does the Queen of the Down Yonder, Our Lady of Cicadas and Swift Judgement, have in common with a girl who is nothing but meat, just blood and fat, just a shiver of hurt and uncertainty? The Queen of Iron, anything like a dead girl flaying herself raw for the sake of a love she can’t even count on? 

Where the hell is your head at.

God’s jaw works back and forth. Her eyes look like something frozen at the bottom of a lake. “You think you know how all this works, because you been hanging off my husband’s coattails? Because if that’s the case, girl, he shoulda told you by now, and you oughta know. Anything down here is always gonna cost everything you have, and it still ain’t gonna be enough. It never is.” Persephone shakes her head, hair flying, lips pressed tight, and she continues, “I’m sorry, about how things shook out. I am sorry. But you gotta drop this, because it ain’t happenin’.”

“His hands bleed. That’s how long he stays on the line. I’ve seen them.”

“I’ll bet they do. Man never did know when to stop. Pain’s like money to my husband. He thinks he can bargain with it. A lot like you seem to.” God stares Eurydice down. She smiles, and there is no warmth in it at all. “I’m not my husband, girl. I don’t care how much it hurts. I don’t care what you know. You can’t buy what you want offa me.”

“I_—"_

“_Enough. _” God growls, low and awful, with her Dogs slavering at her sides with a sound like nothing Eurydice has ever heard.

And maybe God doesn’t try too awfully hard to keep ahold of the leash.

And God’s Dogs know Eurydice. 

But they love their Mama more.

Here is the shape of it:

God don’t set her Dogs on a girl. She wouldn’t do that.

But the air around God gets thick, and hot, like the worst part of summer, but at the same time too cold to breathe, and it burns the insides of Eurydice's lungs either way. In God’s right hand is Vengeance, and in God’s left hand is a leash, but only the very end of it, pulled out almost to breaking as God’s dogs strain against it, snapping and snarling. God’s Dogs know only that they love their Mama. That they will run to ground whatever’s got her ire up. God’s face is dark, but at the same time, too bright to look at. God is radiant and awful. The pressure is unbearable. 

Something’s gotta break. Something’s gonna. Either gonna be the leash, snapped like a twig and sending God’s Dogs barreling forward like an oncoming train, all teeth, or it’s gonna be a girl. 

Eurydice cannot stand. Can’t breathe.

She runs.

Eurydice bolts, cast out from the Presence, trailing hurt like shrapnel, and God huddles then, over her panting hounds, down on her knees in the dirt. Been a while since God acted like God down here. Wears her out.

One of them whines softly. Licks her cheek.

“It’s okay, babies,” she whispers, “Mama’s just mad. Mama just wants everybody to leave well enough alone.”

She hangs on their necks, ruffles their ears in her palms until she can breathe without a spitting rage welling up in the pit of her chest.

Persephone looks up.

“That includes _ you, _” she says, through her teeth, and what happens in Hell is that, right then, the Grid goes out.

* * *

**XII. Can’t Punch Out**

First shift wakes to darkness. And the second. And the third.

It gets black as the End of Days down in Hell, but the whistles still blow, and the punch-cards still punch, and there is nowhere to run but the line.

Eurydice works, because it’s all her body knows how to do anymore.

* * *

**XIII. Blackout**

A prayer to Hades: _ God, get that Grid up. God, get those lights on. Lord, get that mechanic down here, hell is he, anyway? God, it’s dark down here. _

Eurydice works the second shift, fiddling nervously with her lamp, and in the dark, prays:

_ Hello? I’m sorry, but I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know what to do. I’m so _ ** _tired_**_. Everything hurts, and I’m tired. Scared. I think...I think I need help. _

Mechanics swarm over the line like so many beetles, bristling with wrenches and wire, but none of them have white hair, and the Grid stays dark.

Eurydice prays and prays, tossing cigarette butts like offerings into any open furnace she can get to, working through her fifteen. Can’t stop moving. If she stopped, she might start thinking again, and that’d be worse. Eurydice searches the host of mechanics and machinists for a familiar face, which never shows.

Until it does.

Hades, who is called the King of the Dead, appears unto Eurydice, in a flat workman’s cap and an old undershirt filthy with machine oil. He hands her a pair of pliers.

“Anything frayed, twist it back. And mind your gloves; anything too loose gets caught, it’s gonna take your hand with it.”

He squeezes her shoulder, not ungently, but not—hell, she don’t know what it feels like, other than heavy. He nods.

“Go on.”

Eurydice stares at the pliers. Licks her lips.

“She said we had a lot in common. Is that why you’re helping me?”

Mr. Hades, his shoulders do not tense so much as they ripple, a slow, tectonic roll while his mouth thins into a rueful slash. 

“Didn’t anybody teach you not to look a gift horse in the mouth? Never you mind why. It’ll get done.”

He hefts his wrench, and starts away, only to pull up short with a low chuckle. “Might wanna keep praying, til it does. Don’t know how the hell you did it, but you sure did manage to hit every sore spot she has.”

The dark swallows him.

Eurydice hitches up her gloves.

Eurydice lowers her head.

She prays_. _

* * *

**XIV.** **_Hadoa chisosensis_**

Persephone watches the Grid go back up, nursing her gin with a dog in her lap. Two more at her feet.

The door creaks open and closed. She stares at her husband’s bare arms, caked with grime and sweat, and if it stirs anything in her, well, Persephone learned how to tamp down on that a long fuckin’ time ago, tell you what. She swirls her highball.

“So she wasn’t lying after all. I had my doubts. You out there shoveling coal every day that I’m gone?”

He rakes his hand once, just once, over the high, white crown of his hair, streaking it black, and huffs, “No. Not every day.”

“Do I wanna know what it means that I’m hearing this from her, and not you?”

Hades, he don’t answer. Just calls the dogs up off the floor and to his side. Stands there, silently petting their ears, until finally he says:

“Wouldn’t cost you nothing, to just let the girl have her way.”

She shoos the remaining dog off her lap. Lays down her glass on the windowsill. Persephone rounds on her husband, furious, hissing:

“You wanna talk about _ cost_, lover, you wanna talk about what it cost to _ me _ to ask you to give the pair of them a chance in the first place? What it cost _ me _ all this time? And all of that for what? You were right. Boy couldn’t do it. Love can’t save nobody. You win. Thought you’d like that.”

Her voice scrapes low, growling. Outside, the Grid flickers: 

Sodium yellow. 

Mercury blue. 

Neon like tulip fields, in every colour imaginable, and it’s beautiful, light streaming in like it loves her, and she hates it. Persphone presses her forehead to windowpane, reaching for her glass. Squeezes her eyes shut.

“It’s _ over_, Hades. For once, just let it be over.”

The door creaks open. He waves the dogs out, their nails _ click_-ing softly on the stone. The door closes.

“How long,” he murmurs, “have we been married?”

Silence. 

Whatever’s between them these days, it stretches long and starved in the still air, taut almost to breaking. And then it keeps going. Whatever’s between Hades and Persephone, it just goes on and on and on, like staring down the barrel of a gun. As you were, Ladies and Gents. Nobody moves, nobody gets hurt.

She swirls the ice chips melting in her glass. Swallows.

“...Since the world began. Why are you doing this.”

Hades steps within reach of her shoulder. He doesn’t touch her.

“Do you remember,” he says, lower than the Pit itself, soft as sleeping, “I came to see you, middle of August, and everything was screaming. Cicadas, everywhere.”

Hades stretches out his hand, creased and cracked like a mine long since worked dry. He brushes his fingertips, and only his fingertips, down the length of her arm, and goes on, “And even your Mama was about ready to send the lot of ‘em down to the Pit, just to get two minutes quiet, and I said they sounded like something of mine. Power lines.”

His breath stirs her hair. Persphone sets her jaw, and does not move.

“I told you they sounded like power station outflow cables, and you asked me what the hell I meant. You clean forgot about it until I brought you down, and you asked me how the hell I had cicadas down here. You laughed.”

He flattens his palm to the curve of her waist, and God allows it, lets herself be turned to face him. But she don’t look up, and she don’t open her eyes. She just sighs.

“Why now? All this time, and you never once took an interest, and now you’re gonna stand here, and pull this? For her sake?”

“Not hers.”

A man fills the gulf of his need with work. He tinkers. He engineers. A man solves practical problems. He tips his wife’s chin up, fingers soft on her jaw, waits for her to look at him.

“I can see everything that girl ever did in her whole life, good, bad, indifferent. And I still do not have the slightest goddamn notion what she could possibly have to say to him. Girl gets cut to the quick, and begs for the knife back.”

Girl gets stung, and goes running right back to the hornets’ nest with a stick, and starts swinging. A man doesn’t understand it, not at all. How you keep trying, how it all turns out. So, being an engineer, what a man wants is a prototype. A proof of concept.

Hell, a man’s been nursing his lumps in the dark long enough. He can ask for a light, can’t he? Least a God can do.

A man gathers his wife to him. 

Slowly, after a long, terrible silence, she nods.

* * *

**XV. Blood and Fat**

Here is the shape of it:

A boy stands with a guitar on his back and a knife in his hand, and God’s hand on his shoulder, warm and brown.

He shivers.

It’s not a pretty business, calling a ghost. Takes work, takes blood and fat to stitch a shade down long enough to talk, and at least half of him balks at the very thought of it. He hums nervously under this breath. Not even sure if he’s got it in him, tell the truth.

But he’s gonna try.

**Author's Note:**

> Hit ya bitch up on [tumblr](https://www.thefaustaesthetic.tumblr.com) or [twitter](https://www.twitter.com/gin_n_chthonic) for more of the same


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